


pomerium

by Trell (orphan_account)



Category: One Piece
Genre: Alternate Canon, Future Fic, Gen, Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-24
Updated: 2018-06-24
Packaged: 2019-05-27 04:50:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15017021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/Trell
Summary: In which Law and Monet don't talk about Donquixote Rocinante, sixteen years dead.





	pomerium

**Author's Note:**

> Coda to a fic that mostly doesn't exist, in which Law and Monet are trapped in an abandoned seastone mine by creatures that feed off negative emotions—and shapeshift into loved ones from the victim's memories to elicit them. This tactic is made especially efficient by the effects of large quantities of seastone in close proximity, which (based on certain suggestive aspects of the canon) is assumed to have properties similar to those of [saronite](https://wow.gamepedia.com/Saronite#The_side_effects_of_saronite_mining).
> 
> It would likely be helpful to first read [this standalone scene](http://trellwords.tumblr.com/post/152454588851/for-an-instant-laws-eyes-went-startled-wide-a), which follows immediately after Law and Monet's encounter with a shapeshifter in the form of Corazón.

Monet found Law on the aft deck, alone—how else?—and sprawled gloomily the bench normally reserved for the man on watch. He stirred when he heard her approach, as though meaning to get up, but abandoned the effort when he saw it was her.

She didn't dare attempt a smile, but said lightly, “Slow morning?”

“The slowest." He looked up at her through eyes half-lidded against the eastern glare; the water shimmered dazzlingly beyond the railing. "Did you come to hide from the crew, or has something gone terribly awry?”

“Nothing yet today,” she assured him, and produced from under her wing the bottle of wine she’d procured at the last island. “I brought this.” A peace offering, for intruding on his unhappy rumination.

Law beheld the wine with muted interest. The prospect of alcohol appeared to win out over his desire for solitary melancholy, for he eventually said, "Give it here," and thrust out a hand for the bottle.

She obliged, wordlessly passing it to him along with the corkscrew. He disentangled himself from his sword—it rested habitually against his shoulder, scabbard tassels draped behind his back—and set about freeing the contents, yanking out the cork with a single loud pop.

While he set the corkscrew aside she settled beside him, folding her wings carefully out of the way. “I hope you don’t mind sharing. I didn’t think I could make it to the the glasses without being accosted, carrying the bottle.”

“Not remotely,” Law assured her, and took a swig directly from it. By the generous amount he swallowed before handing it over, she judged she'd been right in her guess that his sojourn here had been anything but restful.

She took a swig of her own after him, a little less vigorous, and asked cautiously, “Still thinking about—“ _the selkies_ , “—the winter island?”

He didn’t quite look at her, taking the bottle back. “Mm.”

She hesitated, then forged on, before she lost her nerve. “I wanted to tell you—I said a lot of things, back in those caves. I didn’t mean most of them.”

“Which ones did you mean?” he asked, mildly, but went on without giving her a chance to answer. “I know that. You don’t need to tell me. Or apologize.” Another sizeable quantity of wine departed the bottle before he traded it back.

“I do.” She shook her head, resting the bottle on one knee, a feathery hand curled around its throat. “Especially what I said about Strawhat. And about him . . . knowing more, about that man, the one they showed you. I—you don’t owe me that story. I know that.”

“No,” said Law tersely, “I don’t.” She flinched, for all that this was fair enough; he noticed, glancing at her, and added, “It’s not . . . it’s not something I would have ever told him, either, but for exigent circumstances. It’s not something he earned, and you didn't. He was just . . .”

“In the right place at the right time?” she suggested.

He have her a ghostly half-smile. “Or the wrong one.”

“You . . . facing that man, you looked like someone had reached in, and pulled your heart right out.” She didn’t stop to acknowledge the impossibility of this, with his heart already missing, beating somewhere far away across some unknown stretch of sea. A fact that had saved them, in the seastone caves. “It scared me, seeing that there was someone,” she just managed to swallow the _else_ that threatened to follow this, “someone who could do that to you.”

A deep sigh escaped him, and he seemed to deflate, sink still more against the bench. He said, “I’d like that bottle back, I think.”

She bit her tongue and passed it to him. He accepted gratefully; she tried to estimate how much of the wine had gone to him, and how well on the way to drunk he was. Not quite yet, she didn’t think, though he was slight enough to be a lightweight, and drank rarely enough that it was hard to guess at the results.

After another round with the wine, Law set the bottle between them and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, head bent. She watched as he knit his long fingers together, the letters D E A T H on his knuckles all lined up in a row.

He was silent for so long that she thought perhaps they were done speaking, but then he said, “I met this man, once . . . this was years ago, before the Grand Line.” Monet made an encouraging noise; he went on, “We stopped over at a Latian harbor to resupply, only to find the city caught up in some kind of ancestor-worship festivities—everyone feasting and visiting the graveyards that lay beyond the city wall, carrying flowers and wine-soaked bread to leave amid the tombs and sculptures.

“That was the strangest thing. Sculptures and reliefs and sarcophagi, everywhere, everything from lifelike statues down, so that even the poorest burial sites had at least an etching. I’d never seen anything like it. A graveyard full of detailed likenesses of the dead, not just bleak tombs and memorial stones . . . it would have felt crowded even without the visitors, I thought, even absent of anyone living at all.

“I spent an afternoon walking alone through them, looking. Eventually I caught someone without a swarm of relatives in tow, a lone man heading back to the city, and asked him about the images of the deceased.

“He told me his people believed that . . . the dead lived on, in pieces, so long as there remained among the living someone that had known them in person, that remembered them in full, firsthand. That the statues and likenesses were to aid those in whom the dead lived in recalling what they looked like, to keep their faces and memories from fading into obscurity.”

He stopped, then, at this odd juncture, and drew a long breath. Monet could have counted on one hand the number of times she’d heard him speak so many words at once; she remained silent, afraid to interrupt the deluge, to halt whatever it was he meant to say.

“The man you saw,” Law said at last, after the pause had stretched for some time. “It, ah . . . it struck me, afterward, when I could walk and talk again, that I hadn’t really had a clear memory of what he looked like. I hadn’t seen him in—not for a long time. He was just a foggy collection of features, by then, the shadow of a person. Or the frame of one. Not really him.”

Realization dawned, and Monet blurted, “But the selkies—they found the true memory, somewhere, and they pulled it out. Right? Not the one you had in your head, but some original moment, buried underneath all the years that came after.”

“Yes.” The word left him in a sigh, and his gaze strayed back to the wine bottle, contemplative. “A Latian would say, they did me the greatest favor anyone could. Memory made flesh, and in doing so prolonging mine.” 

He didn’t look like someone who’d been done a favor. He looked— _haunted,_ Monet thought, and wasn’t that just another way of looking at what the Latians meant to do? Aloud, she said, “You don’t sound happy about it. Did you . . . were you hoping to forget?”

“No!” Law exclaimed, caught himself, continued more quietly. “No. Never. Everything I did until Dressrosa, every action and plan and outcome—all of it, everything, was for him.” He glanced up at her, catching the way her eyebrows shot up, shook his head. “I can’t tell you why. I won’t. That’s not the point, anyway. The point is, I, the things I do, they’re . . . the only thing left of him in the universe. His hands, through mine.”

He looked down at his hands again, then, opening them to stare unseeing at his palms. “Only I never could be the kind of person he would have wanted. Seeing him again, it . . . made that very clear to me. Like he’d come back to tell me so, to show me again what he was like. To remind me how much I failed.”

“If he was so good a person as as all that,” Monet said, “surely he wouldn’t be so callous as to think you _failed_.”

He looked sharply up at her, expression tense. “What?”

“Whoever he was,” she gave a shrug with one shoulder, making it clear she didn’t mean to pursue the topic, “he must have cared for you, for you to,” _love him so much_ , “think so highly of him. And if he did—no matter if you lived up to whatever legacy he left—he couldn’t possibly think so little of you.”

Law frowned, digesting this, and looked away; down at his feet, then out over the waves. “No,” he said finally. “No, I don’t think so. Not when I . . . no.”

She knew better than to press him on it, just then, though she wanted to, wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him until he got it, until he _understood_. Until he didn’t recoil anymore from his own existence, looking at himself as one might at something foul. 

She suffered only a mild flash of bitterness, wondering whether he would believe it if came instead from Luffy’s mouth. _I love you. Why can’t you see the person I see, every day?_

Not the person she had _seen_ , it occurred to her, and—finding an opportunity for reciprocity, fairness and her point wrapped all in one—she said, “Do you know, the person the selkies showed me more than anyone else, it was you?”

He shifted uncomfortably at this. “I’d . . . wondered.”

“Dying, most often, or dead, or mortally wounded.” No different from what they’d shown him of the people he loved, she was sure. “But sometimes they’d try to pair you together with Joker, and make you play the villain—the one holding me captive, say, or hurting my sister, or a dozen other awful things.”

Law looked sick. She was struck, too late, by the horrible realization that perhaps they’d shown _him_ himself, too, and hurried on to her point, not having meant to make him dwell on that particular nightmare. “But the thing is, when I had even the smallest shred of my mind—it didn’t work. Even with the seastone roar filling my head, I didn’t believe them, didn’t believe it was you, because I _know_ you. Know you well enough to believe that, when it’s down to the wire, you make the right choices.”

He was watching her _now,_ she saw, unblinking and a little dazed, and she seized the moment. Held his gaze and said, “You say you failed. I think, if they couldn’t make me believe it was you, but they could make you believe it was him—you’ve got one up on him already. Don't you?”

Law opened his mouth as though to protest, and closed it again. He looked stricken, like she’d just said something astonishing, rather than pointing out a simple logic. 

She opened her feathered hands at him, palm-up, as though to say: _see?_

His reply, when he found his tongue at last, came out as a rasp. “I think,” he said, “I’ll have to think some more about that one.”

“Do,” Monet said, and kept herself from saying anything more by taking her turn at the bottle, still standing mercifully unempty between them.

They sat in silence for a long time after that, both watching the glimmering stretch of the sea. The built-up tension faded back into something more companionable, even—almost—easy, but for the sorrow lingering about Law. A clinging funerary air that hadn’t left him since their time in the caves, and Monet thought she understood it better, now, having heard the story of the Latians. _Veneration, right._

She hardly heard him when he spoke again, some time later. He was staring out beyond the stern, gaze fixed somewhere on the heat-waver line of the horizon, and the words were hardly more than a breath. “Still. How good it would be, to forget.”

Not a wish, but a wist; a thought of a kinder, brighter universe, where they didn’t carry their ghosts around with them, as desperate to hold on as to escape. Monet, laden with her own dead, surely understood.

They finished the bottle together.

**Author's Note:**

> "Latians" is, of course, a bastardization of "Latins." Law loosely describes the Parentalia, and the theological gist of pre-Rome Latium.


End file.
